Hello, I’ve been trying to make a low poly island currently with Unity3d, however there’s very little support on their forums and no helpful tutorials to what I’m trying to do, I’m starting from scratch with little modelling experience and pretty much no coding experience (I hear you don’t need to be a coder to use Unreal anyway), so I have some questions before I start trying to use Unreal instead.
Here is a picture taken from Unity of what I’ve been doing (detail unfinished, I’m going to try and scrub out the triangular looking textures):
Can Unreal easily handle a low poly style open world game, spawning and despawning chunks that the player can or cannot see (kind of like in Minecraft), in my case I’ve been making 20x20 chunks in Blender and then assembling them in the game engine.
I’ve had a real hard time trying to make low poly trees and plants blow/sway with the ‘wind’, they don’t need to be effected by weather, a simple permanent motion is good enough, is there any simple way I can do this Unreal Engine and apply it to all trees, plants and grass?
Collision models, does Unreal have some built in function that automatically gives models collision boxes? It’d mainly be for the custom terrain objects as you can see in the picture and so it needs to be pretty accurate with slopes, cliff faces, etc.
Spawning/despawning chunks is gonna be rather difficult from what I’ve heard. In UE, you can’t easily generate terrain at runtime and have it load/unload chunks without a good bit of know-how. If you do want to try this method, watch this for some good information about how to load/unload simple terrain: Unreal Minecraft - Twitch 12h challenge - 1. Generating endless World - YouTube
The method may be different depending on the type of asset (type of model, is it foliage, etc), but yes you can do what you’re asking.
UE does auto generate collision for you, and you can even pick the type of collision it generates. Obviously the more complex/accurate the collision, more calculations are run and after awhile this can start to adversely affect performance.
That’d probably be a huge problem then, since each square in this picture is a 20x20 chunk - http://i.imgur.com/ZQ8B3Ur.png :eek:
Thanks for the info!
Not quite sure what I’ll do about the chunk spawning and despawning then, seems like a huge set back, the island has to be big since it’d be a multiplayer survival game where hiding is alot of the time necessary.
Okay, so are you wanting to procedurally generate terrain like in Minecraft or is this landscape hand made? This is very important to answering your question.
If it’s procedural, that’s when things get hard, but otherwise, what you want can be done pretty easily with level streaming.
Welcome to Unreal, I think you’ll find that this engine has a lot more more to offer than Unity.
One thing to note, is that even though UE4 includes the excellent Blueprint editor, it’s not going to do all the work for you. Since it’s a visual scripting system, you will still need to know how to program at a high level. You’ll have to think like an engineer in order to solve problems and figure out solutions with BP.
For example, like a programmer, you *will * need to be knowledgeable in loops, arrays, functions, if statements, how to make comparisons, etc. You don’t need to know the syntax or how to write C++, but you do need to have programming knowledge to be proficient with BP. Does that make sense?
Anyways, welcome again and feel free to ask anything, no matter how basic or trivial it may seem.
Thanks for the replies guys, is it possible I can just ditch the loading/unloading chunks idea and straight up map the whole island in 3 or 4 large chunks (which will always stay in place) or will this seriously effect players performance? Bare in mind I’m going for low poly style which if I’m correct isn’t as punishing on peoples computers as normal levels of detail that you see in todays games.
To be honest, I don’t think it’s the loading/unloading chunks of your map part that’s difficult, as you can achieve this with smart level streaming. It’s definitely less work to organize level streaming for 3 or 4 “chunks”, but performance will really be based on how many assets are in each chunk.
I’m by no means a veteran but:
It’s a bit hard answer your question because we’re not the unloading/loading chunks part is part of your aesthetic (as some one mentioned procedural generated terrains),or you’re just doing it because you’re worried about performance. Most people aren’t worried about performance when streaming in the level, and more so all the other assets on the terrain. For example, if you have like 500 trees, you may want to stream those in gradually rather than have 500 trees pop up at once. If you have an “open world”, the gist is you’re breaking the world into many little level maps that are streamed in an opportune times, but as long as the maps aren’t gigantic and you level stream them in a smart way, the player shouldn’t even notice.
I’ve started making some progress, decided to ditch my custom terrain objects and use Unreal’s own terrain system, not quite sure how I’ll do some detailed cliff faces and such with the terrain tool but for now I’m just testing things out.
